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Canadians Plan to Build World's Biggest Telescope
Jerry Rivers writes "If all goes according to plan, Canada will be home to the world's largest telescope.
The international project, which has the support of the U.S. Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics, is still in the funding stages but when finished it will be roughly the size of a football field.
Maybe with this they'll finally find the Restaurant at the End of the Universe."
Not quite done by Canadians then. Especially if it's getting funding from a US company...
Death by snoo-snoo!
When completed this Canadian telescope may well be the largest single telescope.
However, is it larger than the effective size of the Very Large Telecope array? Or the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope to be built in Chile?
Well, yes, I found the end of Mostly Harmless to be a let down. Obviously Douglas Adams wanted the series to end so he wrote as final an ending as you can imagine. If I had enough motivation to be a fanfic writer, I would have created a follow-up based on a loophole that allowed one Earth to survive. It turned out that there is one more dimension than the creators of the transdimensional Guide were aware of. That extra dimension is the place where Bob reigns (was it Old Thrashbarg who worshipped Bob?), and Earth still exists...
...". I should give it another listen soon.
OTOH, the rest of the book was great. The whole 'Perfectly Normal Beasts/Domain of the King' business had me in awe of Adams' imagination. I've actually never read the book, since I have the audio version read by Adams himself. Marvelous to hear him intone, "Click, hum
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
The telescope is 30m in diameter.
A football field is roughly 100m long, and 59.4m wide.
By my calculations, the field is about 8x bigger than the telescope.
I happen to have the good fortune to work on The Magdalena Ridge Observatory Interferometer. We're beginning construction very soon, and it is the successor to the COAST telescope in Cambridge.
The advantage of interferometers is that we can have the effective aperture of 400m (so obtaining high angular resolution) without the problem of building and maintaining a distortion-free enormous mirror. Of course, we don't get the sensitivity, but we do get the resolution.
Incidentally, COAST (Cambridge Optical Aperture Synthesis Telsecope), which was built in the late '80s has a better angular resolution than Hubble (although we do have a lot of atmosphere in the way!), and has managed to sucessfully image detail on the surface of stars.
Non-Linux Penguins ?